Shadow Footprints

The first Gay Geek Dinner was held last night. I had an enjoyable time and got to meet new people. After a few late cancels and several no-shows we ended up with eight people in the end, which worked well for chatting together.

We met up at Mighty Mighty, with it's great ambience. Something I hadn't thought about was how strangers could meet each other in what eventually was a busy bar, but we managed. (Maybe that's what happened to the no-shows?)

The Google t-shirts, discounts cards for Moo, and Armageddon swag was well received.

When time came for dinner, i.e. a few people asked when were we eating, we moved on to Southern Cross. Food geeks would love the way steaks are served, on a sizzling hot stone.

One has to slice the steak up into small pieces to cook.

As we finished eating the live music that started playing wasn't to our tastes so wandered back to Mighty Mighty for an after dinner drink, losing three diners in the process.

The evening finished with hot chocolate at Ernesto, being waved at by friendly cops stopped at a red light.

All-in-all an enjoyable evening for the first Gay Geek Dinner, meeting people with similar interests.

Have you ever read the back of your shampoo bottle? Mine says:

Be Luscious!

I'll help you find the strength against damage with my formula fused with pearls & coco mango. My formula, with an anti-breakage potion, strengthens to help prevent any more breaks. Leaving your hair luscious and lovable. Get over your broken hair with my strong-willed conditioner.

use me: love that lather, rinse and repeat.
revenge is sweet and sudsy.

Get a rebound from a bad hair break-up.

With daylight saving coming to a close I was up early enough to take these photos on Tuesday.

I don't like getting up in the dark but scenes like this are almost worth it.

The PeteNic and I went to Karori Wildlife Sanctuary. Although the evening was cold we managed to get a glimpse of the elusive tuatara.

We also encountered a very friendly duck, who wanted to share our picnic dinner.

I went to the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary last week with Pussy Galore. I forgot my camera so had to settle with images from my phone.


I enjoyed myself enough that I signed up as a member.

Breakfast with yr web idols was too early for me at 7:30am so Friday started with Russell Brown and Tales from the Content Side. This was not the advertised presentation. Russell covered how media writes stories as if there is no history. A statistic can be described as alarming when in context to the same statistic 6 months ago a substantial improvement can be seen. This does reinforce my contempt of the mass media. I hate the way every fatal accident is described as a tragedy.

Russell also covered what we blog about, and cited Nielson's Online Consumer Generated Report.

I'm an avid user of rss feeds, currently via Google Reader and was surprised that 92% of internet users are not using rss. It's worth doing and saves time. Set-up takes 2-5 minutes and saved you from visiting sites only to find no new content.

He also pointed out that there are no rich media solutions. What we've seen encourages users to adblock, blocking many inoffensive ads also. For an ad to work it needs to link to a good e-commerce site.

Nest up was Simon Willison with two subjects: OpenID and decentralised social networks.

OpenID

This solves the "What's my password?" and What's my username?" that many people experience, without trying to have the same username/password combo on every site. The web needs a single signon but it needs to be decentralised. OpenID does that. With one (or a few) URLs (or "WWW's") an individual has a unique identifier. By either finding a , or setting up an yourself, you have an ID that requires less signons.

One of the disadvantages of OpenID is phishing, but there are solutions.

Decentralised Social Networking

This works by utilising microformats and relating your different profiles around the web. An advantage could be upcoming.org to use your last.fm profile to recommend events.

Google released a Social Graph API to crawl public relationship data and find your friends, simplifying the need to add all your friends again when you join a new social networking site.

The Transforming Web: To Infinity and Beyond was one of the presentations I was most looking forward to. I stumbled across Tom Coates' online presence several years ago and followed it.

A few of Tom's points were:

• Sites are an interface to a wide range of information
• Your site is not your product. E.g. Twitter's product is people keeping in touch with each other, and only 10% of the traffic is on the website.
• Play well with others. It's good to design for recombination and opening up data sources. It makes your service more attractive with less central development. Creating something that doesn't do much but enhances other sites is a powerful product.
• You can never have too much data. You just have to make the excess manageable. With the additional data you have the potential of combining one dataset with another, increasing data value. Capture metadata whenever you can.
• Hierarchies can't take the weight. Top navigation is just a jumping off point for people finding the path they want.

Tag: Webstock08

I'm currently reading Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager by Michael Lopp. There's a lot to take in with it, so I'm only reading one section at time.

Michael presented Primal Software Development. It made me want to found a start up.

• One of the important things to do when developing version 1.0 is building culture. You don't get to do it again when you build 2.0.
• Another important thing is that your product needs to be unique. The idea doesn't have to be unique. Getting it done is what makes it unique.
• Business plans come later. Getting the product built is more important.

People

• Your first hire is someone who can be the opposite of you, to augment your blind spots.
• While you are small you need to hire complete people, generalists, who talk about every part of the business. Specialists will slow you down and you need to get your product out there quickly.
• Your free electron hire is important. They are the most productive engineer (aka developer) you know. They will do the impossible. They may have strong opinions and produce odd results. They often say no without explaining why it matters. Accept that it matters and move on.
• Your historian is the hire who communicates. They can inject reality into your organisation. They have a deep organisational memory and can explain why some things will not work. They help correct the course.
• The Russian lit major glues the team together. They are not techie but interface well with tech. They may be the program manager or perform a QA role.

No one is indispensable. Get rid of people causing problems.

Process

• Does not have to be red tape.
• Better to have the right people involved in a decision than worry about being right.
• Surround the team with tools that communicate by default.
• Getting comments from version control provides a status report.
• Track bugs.

Product

• Remember: You don't have a business until you have a product.
• First impressions matter.
• You are too close to the product. Use outside people to provide real feedback.
• Culture matters to a product.

"Successful products are ones where the culture spills out of them."

Change what you do every 3 years; it keeps you smart, funny, and sane.

Good Design Ain't Easy, aka The Design of Communication, presented by Jason Santa Maria was one I particularly enjoyed. I didn't make as many notes; there was just so much to take in with his talk and the visuals.

Start with story telling by design. We are trained to look for stories within images. From the imagery you have Graphic Resonance reinforcing the text. The designer is the narrator of the story.

• Use different designs to set the tone of the story.
• Distilling stories down to content weakens the story. (But remember that content has to be good enough to stand by itself.)
• Design within constraints, e.g. type face limitations.
• Looking at good graphic design in print does not give good graphic design online.
• Headings should use the Golden Ratio.
• Use the Rule of Thirds for visual interest.
• Design and adapt your design to the story being told.

Before Jason's presentation I saw someone with the perfect t-shirt saying to complement mine. I arranged to get the fun valentine photo taken immediately after.

A headache had been developing for some time, probably compounded by the twisting of my neck to see the stage. I skipped the Sam Morgan fireside chat with Rowen Simpson and when to a pharmacy to get something for the headache.

I was back in plenty of time for the Powerpoint Karaoke Idol. It was hilarious (and I don't use that word too often). Three speakers ad-libbing a presentation based on 12 unknown slide each lasting 15 seconds. The slides were a mixture of images, including images of opponents, simple text, and extremely complicated diagrams. Judges comments afterwards added to the humour.

Wrapping up the day was Cocktails in the West Wing with Craftstock. I got the chance to be a fan-boy and meet many presenters.

Tag: Webstock08